How often do you find yourself cruising through the apps on your smartphone and wondering: How did they do that? Welcome to the Great Apps series, inspired by the Intel AppUpSM developer program. Today, we give you the story of Words with Friends, the only app on the market that makes Scrabble truly social.

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The story starts with Ensemble Studios, a little Texas video game developing company founded in early 1996 by Tony Goodman and John Boog-Scott. The first game they developed was Age of Empires, and Microsoft signed on as Ensemble's publisher. The success of the series and its expansion packs led to Microsoft purchasing them in 2001, after which they branched out with Age of Mythology and Halo Wars. However, in 2008, Microsoft announced they would be shutting down Ensemble Studios before the end of 2009 and that the subsidiary's entry in the Halo franchise would be their last game.

Some Ensemble developers were asked to stay on at Microsoft, but brothers Paul and David Bettner decided to opt out, stay in Texas and start their own independent studio called Newtoy. They released their first game, Chess with Friends, in their first month. What was revolutionary about their first title is that it was truly app-based: you could play it against another player or against a computer without being in the same room as the player or the computer. Only 8 months after the release of Chess with Friends Newtoy released Words with Friends. The initial downloads weren't great, so they decided to develop a game called We Rule in the hopes that they would start turning a profit.

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The Bettner brothers were convinced their tiny Texas developing house was about to collapse. They even took to watching their servers for downloads and game activity on an hourly basis. Then one man on Twitter single-handedly saved their entire company: pop star John Mayer. He might have quit Twitter a year later, but just after Words with Friends' release, he maintained one of the most influential accounts on Twitter with about 3.7 million followers. And on October 5, 2009, he tweeted, "'Words with Friends' is the new Twitter." The tweet completely revitalized Newtoy as the Bettners literally watched their success increase by the minute. At the time, they had no idea why it was happening, but they later put two and two together, and met up with Mayer after a concert in Dallas to personally thank him for saving their company.

In December 2010, Facebook game giant Zynga purchased Newtoy and changed the studio's name to Zynga with Friends. A little over a year after Mayer's tweet, Words with Friends had shot to the top of charts with over 12 million downloads. By February of 2011, Words with Friends was also available on Android devices as well. As Zynga with Friends, the power of Zynga saw the app both sync up with Facebook Connect and added as an actual app on Facebook. In May, Zynga with Friends even teamed up with Lady Gaga to send ten winners who played Gaga's word of the day to one of her shows.

So if you haven't had the chance to take it for a spin yet, there's plenty of time — Words with Friends won't be going away any time soon. Your friends probably already love it as much as you will.

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The Great Apps Series is inspired by Intel. Have you developed the next Great App? Join the Intel AppUpSM developer program and you could get up to $25,000 in funding so you can develop and distribute your app to multiple app stores powered by Intel AppUp! Click here to sign up and submit now.